See, this is why we need encryption
Indicted NYC mayor forgets phone passcode
Beware fraudulent CrowdStrike emails
Last Friday, computer systems worldwide were taken down by a defective update from enterprise cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike. In the wake of the outage, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency is warning of phishing emails, with attackers posing as CrowdStrike customer support.
What to do about AT&T breach
Around 110 million AT&T subscribers were affected by a data breach from May 1 to Oct. 31, 2022, TechCrunch reported.
Massive Authy leak, plus Proton Docs
The parent company for Authy, an application for two-factor authentication, has issued a critical security update to its Android and iOS users. According to BleepingComputer, hackers utilized leaked phone numbers from past data breaches to identify up to 33 million Authy users.
Eavesdropping on AirPods?
Apple released a firmware update patching a critical Bluetooth vulnerability in AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Fit Pro. According to its support page, an adversary in Bluetooth range could spoof as an intended source device for these wireless headphones. When the targeted headphones send a connection request to the spoofed device, it could eavesdrop on confidential conversations.
Mail surveillance is widespread
According to data unearthed in a congressional probe, more than 60,000 requests by federal investigators and police captured data on 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023.
When data brokers break
We often talk to newsrooms about dealing with data brokers — companies that aggregate and sell data from commercial and public records. According to recent reporting from TechCrunch, an alleged breach of a U.S. data broker impacted at least 300 million people. Their reporting suggests “mixed results” verifying the authenticity of the data.
Apple's password app
In the hope of simplifying how customers can log into apps and websites, Apple has announced it will offer a new Passwords app in its upcoming versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15.
Oops, all breaches!
Data breach notification service “Have I Been Pwned?” has added the login information associated with 361 million email addresses. Have I Been Pwned owner Troy Hunt says as many as 151 million of these unique email addresses have never been seen in his database before. The website boasts tracking over 13.5 billion breach accounts. Some of these credentials are reportedly harvested from users’ devices infected with information-stealing malware.
Slack trains AI models on user data
Over this past week, Slack published a blog post defending its privacy practices following widespread criticism over its use of customer data to train its global AI models. At the moment, organizations are required to opt out to prevent their messages, content, and files from being mined to develop Slack’s AI.
Crossfire over messaging security
Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green explains that “the cryptography behind Signal (also used in WhatsApp and several other messengers) is open source and has been intensively reviewed by cryptographers. When it comes to cryptography, this is pretty much the gold standard.” By comparison, Telegram does not provide end-to-end encryption protection by default and only offers it as an option in one-on-one “Secret Chat” mode.
